Dead by Any Other Name (6 page)

fourteen

Just as I left
the house, Octavia pulled up and leapt out of her car. “I'm afraid I shall have to
kill
that dreadful man. But never mind, he's just jealous. The witch is dead, I've won, Pavel is
mine!!
Ciao-shalom, dear girl, no time to chat, must go paint, my vagina is
adamant
!”

She raced into the house in a fit of … Octavianess.

I got in my car but instead of heading down the drive, I turned up the service road and parked behind the garage, out of sight of the main house. I got out and ducked into the garage.

Inside were a dusty Bentley, a Jaguar, and a Land Rover; there were also ancient croquet sets, tennis rackets, saddles, and the like. Clearly these gals didn't get out of their hothouse too often, and they also clearly had more money than they knew what to do with.

I climbed a staircase at the back of the garage and opened the door into a large loft-like room with a peaked ceiling. It had unpainted wood walls, a vintage kitchen at one end, a woodstove, simple windows, and was furnished in a minimal masculine way, with an enormous roughhewn table, an iron-frame bed, Mission-style chairs, a few bleached animal skulls, a Navajo blanket, wooden candlesticks—the effect was kind of macho chic, like a magazine spread on the weekend house of two gay guys who work in fashion.

There was a picture of Natasha on the refrigerator door and several of her CDs were on the table, along with a small pile of maps of the Hudson Valley, including a nautical map of the river; a bunch of vitamin and supplement bottles were on the kitchen counter. Otherwise the place was without much character, I couldn't get any real sense of who Pavel was, except maybe a certain primal simplicity—or the pretense of same.

I was about to head into the bathroom when I heard the sounds of an approaching motorcycle. I looked out a window—the bike pulled to a stop near my car, the rider swung his long leg over the machine and pulled off his helmet, took a step toward my car and eyed it. Then he walked into the garage.

I tried to compose myself as his footfalls echoed up the stairs. He got to the top, saw me, and stopped. Then he smiled, a slightly lopsided smile, the power of which he was well aware.

Yes, Pavel lived up to his billing—tall, lean and muscled, with a hank of the thickest brown hair on the planet, tawny skin, a killer jawline, a full mouth, and green eyes that just pulled you in, soulful and full of some ineffable promise—a better world, maybe? Or was it just the best sex in history? Stunning as the
parts were, the whole was greater, it was his grace, aura, the
off-kilter smile—and he was just so
hot
. Beauty and sex appeal are two different qualities—I had clients no one would call pretty who spent their lives fighting off advances, and great-looking clients who had a hard time getting laid—Pavel was the ultimate fusion of the two.

Yup, the Gods had smiled on this dude; he had landed at Bumpland and might very well become lord of the manor—clearly those green eyes were not as guileless as they seemed. I reminded myself that the Gods are fickle.

“Hi,” he said.

“I assume you're Pavel.”

“That is me.” He had a pretty strong Eastern European accent.

“I'm Janet Petrocelli.”

“Hello, Janet Petrocelli.”

“You're probably wondering what I'm doing in your house?”

He shrugged. Clearly he was used to people showing up at his house, wherever he lived.

“I'm a friend of Natasha,” I said, ready to clock his reaction.

He smiled again. “I cannot reach Natasha. Did she send you to give me a message?”

If he was acting, he was doing a pretty good job. Either way, the next step was to tell him—and keep an eagle eye on his response.

“No, she didn't send me. I came on my own.” I moved toward him. “Pavel, I have some sad news about her.”

He cocked his head, quizzical.

“She's dead.”

His face grew very grave. “Natasha is dead?”

“Yes.”

He stood dead still for a moment, before asking, “How did she die?”

“It's unclear.”

“Where did she die?”

“On top of Platte Clove. She either fell, jumped, or was pushed from a cliff.”

He went into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of vodka, poured himself a glass. He downed it in one swallow, clenched his jaw. Then he hurled the glass across the room, where it shattered against a wall. We stood in silence. He went to the large table and lit a candle, then he put on one of Natasha's CDs. Her voice filled the room, he smiled at me, sad and sweet, his eyes filled with tears. If this was acting, he was good at it.

“I cannot believe this,” he said.

“How long have you known her?” I asked.

“For a few months. She is a very special woman. … Now she is gone.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Friday night.”

I waited for him to say more, knowing from my years in practice that many people felt a need to fill a silence, and the words that gushed out were often deeply revealing. Pavel felt no such need.

“How did she seem on Friday night?” I asked.

“Beautiful. We went for a night walk and then made love.”

“She didn't seem … frightened at all?”

“She had much on her mind, she was a complicated woman, she kept a part of herself secret from me. She wanted to move to Los Angeles, I wanted her to stay.”

“Haven't you proposed to Octavia?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“I'm the curious type.”

“Sometimes it is better not to know. Keeps you out of trouble.”

“Did you meet Natasha's family?”

“One time. At a party at her parents' house.”

“And?”

“It made Natasha very angry.”

“Did something happen?”

His cellphone rang; he looked at the incoming number and didn't answer. “Natasha is dead and all you do is ask more questions.” He moved to the top of the stairs. “I need to be alone now.”

“I'm sure we'll meet again,” I said as I passed him on my way out.

fifteen

My trip to Stone
Ridge had yielded more questions than answers and my mind was clenched and swirling at the same time. I couldn't really get a bead on Pavel, he didn't seem particularly surprised that Natasha was dead, but at the same time throwing that glass seemed like an act of spontaneous rage at the world. Was he devious or just playing the only card he had? As for Octavia, how far could her passion and jealousy have taken her? I needed a little stress-reducing recreation—thankfully it was still early enough to get up to Zack's.

I sped up to West Sawyerville, where Zack's dollhouse of a cabin sat beside the rushing Plattekill, hard under the eastern escarpment of the Catskills. I found him out in the yard puttering around, as per usual; wearing nothing but crocs and a pair of funky cargo shorts, also as per usual. Every time I saw Zack in this almost-naked state my heart went pitter-pat (okay, it wasn't my heart).

“There she is, my little darlin', prettiest flower in all the garden. You look tired, baby girl. Here, have a sip, this will fix you right up.”

He handed me his Zackwacker, which was basically a whole lot of tequila blendered up with whatever fresh (or frozen) (or canned) fruit he had in the kitchen. It was a delicious and wickedly potent concoction, and it went down easy, especially tonight. I sat on one of the bluestone benches he'd built around the property and looked up at the mountains, glowing in the twilight. In theory this was one of those mellow moments I'd moved upstate to savor, my new laid-back life. In reality my little internal combustion engine was firing on all pistons and the hum sounded a lot like
Natasha-Natasha-Natasha
.

We went inside and while he cooked, I sat at the kitchen table and filled him in on my day down in Stone Ridge.

“I know that Collier Denton character; my old company did his gardens.” Before he earned his landscaping “degree” and went out on his own, Zack worked for a big local landscaper.

“No kidding, what was he like?”

“Dude put the sleaze in sleazy, always had these hustler types hanging around. Plus he stiffed my boss for something like five grand.”

“He just didn't pay it?”

“Bingo. He lived like royalty—a queen to be exact. You should have heard him, ‘I'm sorry, my dear boy, but that hydrangea plant simply
must
be moved three inches to the left.' And this is at 9 in the a.m. while he's drinking a glass of champagne. Then he got fired from his soap opera gig for showing up drunk, and then he started selling shit from his house; he had all kinds of paintings
and silver and knick-knacks and stuff, the place was like a museum.
He also switched to Champale for breakfast. Then he stopped paying his bills, there were all sorts of excuses. Finally we just quit.”

“What about those hustlers?”

“They were hot kids, I remember one was Dominican, another was a hick from up in Schoharie County. Denton would always be trying to ‘educate' them, reciting Shakespeare and playing operas, but you could tell he was nothing but a meal ticket to them—and under his mentor schtick, they were nothing but sex toys to him. There was always some kind of blowup after a month or two and he'd kick them out.”

Was Pavel his latest hustler? And if Denton was as obsessed with Pavel as Octavia was, well, who knows what dark corners of the soul it could have led him into.

“I need to meet this guy.”

“He's a sucker for fans and flattery, old ladies used to show up at his house with presents, he creamed every time, invited them in, showed off the place. I'm telling you, he's a total freak.”

I could feel my adrenaline kick up a notch, my short hairs tingle, my throat tighten. The truth is pathology excites me, the swirling vortex of lust/obsession/degeneracy/evil, the question of how far a human being will go—and what it is within us that
allows
us to go that far. I took a deep sip of the Zackwacker.

Zack leaned over and opened the oven door to braise the chicken. His shorts rode low and pulled tight against his firm beefy butt.

“Close that oven door,” I said.

He straightened and turned to me, “Wassup?”

I walked over to him and undid the top button of his shorts.

“I'm in an eat-dessert-first mood.”

sixteen

I sat at my
kitchen table the next morning reading a follow-up story on Natasha's death in the
Freeman
. The investigation had turned up no signs of foul play, although the cause of death was still officially listed as “undetermined”; it also stated that a memorial service was going to be held in Cold Spring on Saturday evening.

I was sure that Natasha's friend Billie up in Phoenicia was holding out on me. I called her.

“It's Janet Petrocelli.”

“Oh, hi.” She sounded wary.

“How are you?”

“I'm okay.”

“Are you going to Natasha's memorial?”

There was a pause. “I can't, I can't handle it.”

“Listen, I'd like to talk.”

“What about?”

“Natasha.”

“I just lost my best friend and I'm not doing that well.”

“I want to find out what really happened with her death.”

“Thinking about it, maybe she did kill herself. She wasn't happy.”

“If every unhappy person killed themselves, the world would be a ghost town.” I heard her light a cigarette and take a deep pull. “What do you say? Let me buy you a drink.”

There was a long pause, then, “Okay, but nowhere around here.” I heard fear.

“Name your spot.”

She took another deep pull on her smoke and said, “New Paltz.”

“You got it. Does tonight work for you?”

“Yeah.”

I hung up, went into my office/storeroom and went online to find Collier Denton's phone number. I basically hate going online—the whole world is suddenly at your fingertips. I can barely handle the ten feet in front of me, the last thing I want is the whole goddamn world. Shopping online is a freakout. I once went looking for kitchen drawer pulls and with each click I found myself sucked further into a special rung of cyberhell populated by ten trillion kitchen drawer pulls—and each pull could be
enlarged
and viewed from different angles. I ended up—my head one pull away from exploding—ordering these absurd undulating purple-and-orange striped pulls, and when they arrived I was so ashamed that I left them on the front stoop of the animal shelter thrift shop after dark.

But finding a phone number I could handle. And Denton was listed. While pop visits were my preferred M.O., I wanted to be sure I wouldn't be greeted by a slammed door. After all, judging from his response to Octavia he was in a pretty foul head these days.

“Yes?” the affected baritone drawled.

“Hi, is this the Collier Denton who was the star of
The Well Runs Deep
?”

“'Tis he indeed.”

“Hi, my name is Janet Petrocelli, I moved upstate about a year ago and when I heard you were local, well, it would just be an utter thrill for me to meet you.”

I didn't mention that I'd never seen his show, that watching even ten seconds of a soap opera plunged me into existential despair—I always associated them with childhood sick days spent on an itchy couch in the gloomy den of whatever boozy beaten-down relative was currently putting me up. And that ominous music: Melodies to Commit Suicide By.

“Well, I'm
awfully
busy weighing offers and reading scripts, but I suppose that could be arranged. What time could you get here?”

“How about two o'clock?”

“Let me check my datebook …
hmmmm
… yes, two works. I have some time between my Flemish lesson and my harpsichord recital.”

“You speak Flemish and play the harpsichord?”

“The truth is immensely overrated. Do you know how to find
Fleur de Moi
?”

“Sure do. See you at two.”

“Oh, one thing.”

“Yes.”

“I have a special fondness for Veuve Clicquot.”

Just as I hung up, someone rang the doorbell down in the shop. I went down to find George and Mad John outside.

“Come in, guys, what's up?”

Mad John made a beeline for Bub, who adored him. They started up an animated coo-and-caw which a jealous Sputnik—he found Mad John delightfully smellworthy—interrupted with some fierce nuzzling.

George was still wearing jodhpurs. “We need your help with Goat Island,” he said.

“What can I do?”

“We want to catch the looters. That island was sacred to the Esopus Indians for thousands of years. It could turn out to be a major archeological site and these creeps are tearing it up.”

“When the bad people dig up the magic relics, they release demons, demons that haunt us all and make bad things happen on the river and in the valley,” Mad John said. Then he started jumping up and down in place, “Gotta stop it, gotta stop it!”

“Isn't that the state's job?”

“There's no money for things like that these days,” George said. “
We
have to do it.” When he got passionate about saving the valley I was reminded of why I loved him.

“How?”

“Mad John has been casing the island regularly and it seems like the looting is happening in the middle of the night. He thinks we should all go over there and spend a night waiting for the thieves.”

“Could that be dangerous?”

Mad John made a gargoyle face and said, “The demons are dangerous.”

I took a deep breath. Spending a night on a deserted island in the middle of the Hudson waiting for potentially armed thieves to arrive sounded … well, I guess when I thought about it, it sounded kind of exciting.

“Yeah, sure, I'll do it.”

Mad John leapt up, wrapped himself around me and cried, “I love Jan-Jan!”

This drove Sputnik into a paroxysm of jealousy and he leapt up and threw himself against me, causing all of us to tumble into a heap on a nearby sofa.

“Will you please grow up?” George huffed.

“No,” Mad John said.

“Still wearing the jodhpurs?” I asked.

“I've just come from my riding lesson, Antonio says I'm making incredible progress.”

“On a playground horse?”

“I hate to disappoint you, Janet, but I've graduated from the playground horse.”

“That's great, so you're on a real horse now?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“What do you mean sort of ?”

“The horse I am now training on resembles a real horse in many important ways, it's an enormous step up in difficulty from the playground horse. It
bucks
.”

“It bucks?”

“Yes, darling, it bucks.”

“Wait … it's not the mechanical horse over at Price Chopper, is it?”

“Maybe.”

I bit my tongue—the image of George getting a riding lesson on a kiddie horse in front of the supermarket was just too much.

“You know, Janet, the look on your face right now says it all. Well, it's very easy to mock innocence and passion, but Antonio and I are in love and don't care what the world thinks. In fact, I may move to the pampas with him, then you'll be sorry.”

“When do we get to meet him?”

“Antonio comes from a very macho culture.”

“Yes?”

“Which is why he's not gay.”

“He's not gay?”

“He's not
gay
gay.”

“Okay.”

“But we're not hung up on labels.”

“How old is he?”

“Okay, I'm not going down this road.”

“He young! He young! He young!” Mad John cried, jumping up and down again.

George puffed up and said, “He's an old soul.”

“He young!”

“This discussion is over. We're going over to the island next Thursday, we'll rendezvous at Mad John's at sunset. I am now leaving, with my dignity intact.” He marched to the door, opened it, then stopped short and turned, “Oh, Janet, do you have any spare quarters, I want to go practice my canter.”